Thursday, 27 December 2012

Yasujirô Ozu was one of the
most celebrated, idiosyncratic yet -- in his day -- commercially successful
filmmakers in the history of the Japanese film industry. He worked, across nearly
the entirety of his movie-making career, for the Shochiku Company Limited -- the mammoth
studios at
which he first started out as an assistant cameraman in 1923 after
failing his university exams twice. The company was founded in the
late-eighteenth century, initially as a producer of live kabuki theatre; but
it expanded its output to encompass movie production in the 1920s, soon abandoning
the mannered stylisations and all-male yarō-kabuki
conventions of traditional Japanese drama for its own version of the Hollywood
star system during the silent era, which ushered in a mode of narrative
expression much influenced by that which was familiar from American movies of the day, but which was still concerned with portraying the everyday lives of ordinary Japanese
people. Ozu’s work is, of course, renowned for its detailed dissection of family
life, which it achieves through the delicate unwrapping and laying bare of character: the novelistic, in-depth
exploration of inter-generational relationships between Japanese parents and
their children, growing up in a country tinged with regret for a vanishing past even
as it comes to grips with modernity. His work began to develop an appeal
born of the distinctive technical tropes that separated his later approach to the crafts
of filming and editing from the standard visual language adhered to at that
time by almost everybody else working in cinema (both in Japan and abroad)
during the mid-thirties, when he made a silent film called A Story of Floating Weeds (Ukikusa monogatari) – an adaptation
of a 1928 American picture called The
Barker, that had been directed by George Fitzmaurice and starred Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
-- and he continued to perfect and refine his style throughout the Golden Age of
Japanese cinema, creating many masterpieces that only came to the attention
ofwestern audiences in the 1970s. But
it was his late-career colour films which gave full expression to the purest
manifestation of what became known as the
Ozu style. One of his very last films was a fully-fledged remake of Ukikusa
monogatari, which he shot at the age of fifty-six, just a few years
before he died. It was one of the few pictures he made outside the auspices of
the Shockiku studio and only his third in colour. Although Ozu’s work always
stuck closely to the exploration of the same handful of family-related
themes and can in some ways be taken as one project,
constantly retold from a variety of angles, Floating
Weeds was only the second direct remake of an earlier work, coming in the
wake of Good Morning,which had been a reworking of one of
his first major films from 1932: A Picture-Book for
Grown-Ups: I Was Born, But….This latest remake broke new ground in
many ways though, mainly related to the involvement in its production of the
president of Daiei Studios, Masaichi Nagata, who backed the picture after work
on it had stalled at Shochiku.

Nagata is one of the most important studio figures active during
this period of Japanese filmmaking; he produced Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi
just as they were making huge waves on the International festival circuit withRashômonand Ugetsu Monogatari, and he
put into production one of Japan’s most opulent early colour films: Teinosuke
Kinugasa’s magnificent Gate of Hell, also an early example of a successful foreign export for Japan's blooming fifties film industry. Nagata’s involvement lent a similarly high profile to Floating Weeds, which required that Ozu work with a different
cinematographer from his usual collaborator, Yûharu Atsuta - who beforhand had been almost
Ozu’s only photographic partner and who had been instrumental in conceiving the visual look of his films since 1937.
Both men were ‘sceptical’ of the shift to colour photography in the
1950s, and had used it in as understated a way as possible on Ozu's first two
colour outings at Shochiku. But now Nagata paired Ozu with Kazuo Miyagawa --
the top cinematographer at Daiei, and the man who had presided over the visuals of
both Rashômon
and Ugetsu
Monogatari. Miyagawa also enthusiastically embraced the possibilities now opened
up by the growth of colour photography, and the new collaboration between these two masters
of their respective arts (the traditionalist Ozu and the embracer of modern
practices Miyagawa) resulted in Floating
Weeds emerging as a rich, painterly example of Ozu’s best cinema, bringing
new depth and vivid clarity to the director’s spartan sense of film grammar (which had become, by this point, an extremely finely pared aesthetic), but
in a way that actually emphasises its stripped down economical nature rather than
“tarting it up” with unnecessary dressings ... Although Ozu wasn’t going to capitulate
to that other new fifties trend: the craze for CinemaScope - preferring to stick to the traditional “picture-frame”
box image familiar to the Academy Ratio - Floating
Weeds was a sumptuous spectacle of a film, that nevertheless, employed its
colour intelligently and systematically, in selective artistic patterns.

Ozu’s later films come to put
increasingly less and less emphasis on the kind of overtly dramatic events that
normally drive a film’s plot forward. Instead, they base their stories around
the gradual delineation of the relationships between a group of central
characters. The subject matter of Floating Weeds develops out of the arrival,
in a small coastal port town, of a travelling troupe of theatre players led by
its chief actor and employer Komajuro Arashi (Ganjiro Nakamura), during
the stifling heat of the summer of 1958. There is no special effort made in the first act of the film to
draw the viewer’s attention to what will be Komajuro’s importance in the tale
to come: instead, for the first ten minutes,
Ozu follows a set of minor characters who turn out to have little relevance to
the later story, as he lays in place the dynamic governing the behaviour of the
troupe – the itinerant “floating weeds” of the title – and their interactions
with the inhabitants of the town. We see the distribution of pamphlets
advertising the players’ forthcoming programme of traditional kabuki dramas;
and the indifference this arouses in everyone but the town's children - who are
more excited by the arrival of new people in this quiet, sleepy inland port
than by the prospect of the ‘entertainment’ the theatre troupe has to offer.
The members of the troupe themselves, lead a mundane existence between shows:
arriving by ship, packed into its hold in the sweltering heat, the leadfemale member (this is a modern kabuki troupe
who have re-introduced women performers) chain-smoking furiously as she will be
seen to do throughout most later ‘off-stage’ scenes (women smoking is a sure
visual code sign for abrasiveness in Ozu’s cinema), while the male performers
visit the local brothel to haggle over their choice of prostitute or else
attempt to chat up the local beauties … with little success, given the evident
low regard travelling theatricals are held in here, even by a poor coastal
community.

These initial scenes provide us with an evocative sketch portrait of
the community and its visitors that resonates far beyond the mere handful of
sequences set before us to illustrate it. Gradually, Master Komajuro and his current mistress
Sumiko (played by one of the most recognisable actresses in ‘50s Japanese
cinema, Machiko Kyō) emerge as the key characters in this set-up: Komajuro
assures the town theatre’s impresario (Chishû Ryû) and the players of his own
troupe, that their initially poor audiences will soon pick up as the
season progresses. But the signs are that the particular programme Komajuro and
his players have to offer is these days considered old-fashioned, and their
style of acting thought quaint and ‘hammy’. It also turns out that Komajuro is
preoccupied by other interests in the area: his former mistress, the owner of a
local Sake bar (Haruko Sugimura) lives here with his illegitimate son from their former relationship, Kiyoshi
(Hiroshi Kawaguchi), and Komajuro hasn’t seen
either of them for many years before this latest visit. Komajuro’s visits always
depend on the itinerary of his troupe, and the boy doesn’t even know the true
nature of his connection to a man he calls uncle and thinks of as just a friend
of the family.

﻿

The film’s first hour makes fine use
of the poignancy suggested by this situation, as it explores various facets of the
character of each of the three main parties involved in the much older relationship.
Nakamura’s comic displays of over-enthusiasm, which erupt out of his desire to
engage a reticent Kiyoshi in numerous father-son bonding activities -- such as
fishing or endless games of Go (which he plays because Kiyoshi is keen on the
game, not because he has any particular aptitude for it); his need for excuses
to spend his free time with the boy, while being anxious to maintain the secrecy
that surrounds their relationship and not reveal who he really is to his son, makes for a gentle, relaxed form of
humour, etched with regret. Contrasting the precariousness of theatre life via the troupe’s
dependency on achieving a certain degree of popular success with its show in order to
enable Komajuro to earn enough money to be able to afford to move on to the
next town, lest his performers become “stranded” in one place, and setting that situation next to the ‘master’s’
desire also to experience a simulacrum of settled family life, but still always
with the option of one day moving on, bit by bit brings out the sensibilities of each
of the main players: Komajuro’s former mistress Oyoshi, gently appears to
accept the father of her child’s causal, on-off relationship with their son, while harbouring
the secret wish that he will eventually decide to stay put and the three of
them might one day settle down as a proper family. Kiyoshi, meanwhile, ostensibly
unaware of the true basis of of his relationship with his mother’s slightly
eccentric and over-chummy avuncular friend, dreams of leaving the sleepy port
behind, and, with that in mind, is being trained in maths by the local postmaster in preparation for
leaving for university. Unfortunately, the increasing frequency of Komajuro’s absences
from the troupe between shows comes to be noticed by his employees and eventually his current
mistress, Sumiko, learns from one of the veteran actors (who has travelled with
the master on many other sojourns across the country with the troupe, down the years), about Komajuro’s
secret son, and of his former relationship with Oyoshi, the owner of the Sake
drinking joint; jealous and fearful of her own precariousness in this
situation, Sumiko hatches a cynical plot to split up this threateningly cosy
makeshift family unit which potentially threatens the continuation of the troupe and therefore
her own relationship with its owner, by forcing one of the younger, prettier
female performers travelling with the theatre -- an actress called Kayo (Ayako Wakao) -- to seduce Kiyoshi!

﻿

The relationship between Kayo
and the virginal Kiyoshi becomes a serious one and the two of them plot to run
away with each other, the previously conscientious Kiyoshi now willingly abandoning
his hard-won studies in order to do so, apparently just as Sumiko had planned
when she came up with the idea to pair the two off as part of her revenge on
her master. A darker side to Komajuro’s nature emerges in the second half of
the film; despite his justified anger at Sumiko’s dirty tricks, his own attempts
to enjoy the benefits of fatherhood without any of its responsibilities don’t always
paint him in the best of lights (even the pliant Oyoshi reminds him that she’s
familiar with his’ crafty’ ways, at one point). The illicit relationship
between the two youngsters also reveals Komajuro’s less than flattering attitude
towards the women who work for him as performers in the kabuki theatre plays:
he speaks of Kiyoshi being “ruined” by the association and of the gentle Kayo as though she were
inherently no better than a whore because of her stage-based profession, and this
naturally leads to the inevitable confrontation between himself and Kiyoshi. Ozu
unfolds this cauldron of previously unvoiced prejudices and emotions in his
traditional un-showy, unmistakably direct yet subtle style, so that these people’s
jealousy, bitterness, regret and self-deception emerges out of the deepest
expressions of his characters' intrinsic being, rather than merely as motors for
pursuing the next stage of a contrived developing action. A stoic melancholy
acceptance of their flaws (and all the characters are flawed in
some way … yet also likable in an almost equal measure at different stages
during the two hours we spend with them) pervades a languid atmosphere, in which
a sad but resilient attitude to the hardships of the present, for characters
caught up in their own version of the past, is amplified by the most
uncompromising version of the Yasujirô Ozu house style – a style which emphasises
continuity through its complete lack of camera movement and rejection of transition effects
for bridging scenes – fades, wipes, dissolves, etc -- leaving the film with a sense of passivity and stasis.

For all the apparent possibilities and expectations for change his characters might share, Ozu’s cinema favours incident over plot, dawning realisation over actual change in circumstances. His stories generally do not move from one set of major events to another, but instead tell of the sadness of time passing or “mano no aware”. The darkening of mood in the second half of the film is implied in the mere texture of the difference between the gentle, pastel shades of colour which are predominant in Kazuo Miyagawa’s cinematography during the unvarying static daytime shots of the film’s first hour, and the bright fabrics of the characters’ kimonos set in a sharp relief against the darkness of the night-time exteriors and candle-lit interiors which dominate the second half. Floating Weeds soon came to be seen as another one of Ozu’s greatest masterpieces and its refined but vivid use of colour photography and art direction brings a whole new angle to the director’s pared down minimalist style, which makes it an ideal place to start for those new to his cinema.

The latest Masters of Cinema release of the title is a dual-format edition combining a DVD copy and a Blu-ray disc in the same package, and features a high definition transfer that provides an authentic rendering of the film for the medium: typically unflashy but a step above most standard definition treatments. The mono sound is a little noisy and quite muddy, but still adequate, and the on-screen removable English sub-titles are clear and literate and of a decent but unobtrusive size. The release is not overburdened with extras (there is only a trailer on the disc itself) but the accompanying thirty-six page booklet contains a very informative and readable essay on the film by film critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, called Getting an Angle on Ozu, which examines the pre-production history of the film and provides a convincing analysis of the finished work. There is also a selection of quotations from Ozu’s published diaries included at the back of the booklet.

Floating Weeds is another timeless classic of late Golden Age post-war Japanese cinema, and makes for rewarding viewing in this high quality formatted edition.

Tuesday, 18 December 2012

This much misunderstood psychological
horror film with an oddball New York Christmas slant now gets its seasonal due
on DVD in the UK, thirty years after its initial flop release, thanks to the timely
attentions of Arrow Video. The ‘evil Santa’ motif spawned a handful of
Christmassy horror flicks back in the eighties, but most of them were firmly
grounded in the slasher genre, their makers inspired by the success
of Halloween to have a go at making everyone’s favourite annual winter holiday
season the basis of some often very similar and unimaginative material. Few of
these films had much to offer beyond the cheese factor involved in setting a
killer Santa Claus on a murderous serial killing rampage, and even that aspect
of them had already been anticipated by the memorable Tales from the Crypt
story first adapted by Amicus for their ‘70s film version and later remade for
the anthology TV series that followed in the 1990s. But the very qualities that led
Christmas Evil (originally titled You Better Watch Out) to be dismissed or
ignored when it first came out, now serve to distinguish it as one of the more
original and well-crafted entries in the niche interest Christmas horror sub-genre.
The film became actually one
of the first full features to tackle the killer Santa Claus theme. Director
Lewis Jackson spent ten years attempting to bring this independent production, birthed
in an idea he first had in 1970, to the screen: he planned, drew and laid out
precise storyboards for the whole project in advance, which in turn managed to help
persuade the esteemed French cinematographer Ricardo Aronovich to come over to
the U.S. in order to lens this low-budget flick, despite the fact that the rest
of his lighting crew would be made up of inexperienced first-timers and the shoot would often involve
working long, arduous non-union approved hours.

The result was in fact a rich, black,
Grindhouse blend of weirdo comedy and drama, shot in an arthouse style and generally approached as
though the film were intended as a serious psychological portrait (by, say, John Cassavetes) of
mental decline in an unforgiving urban setting … but still decorated with tinsel and holly and liberally furnished
with a mordantly ironical sense of ice-cold humour.

The film refuses to be
slotted into any one identifiable genre: there are moments of absurdist comedy;
others deal in sharp, cynical satire; and still others are redolent with cheap exploitation-heavy,
drive-in-ready gore (although you have to wait a good fifty minutes for any of that to appear
– a fact which straightaway alienated any audience for such material it might
ever have had). Jackson was more influenced by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Fritz
Lang than he was by John Carpenter or the Friday the 13th
franchise; the relaxed pacing, the film’s avant-garde edginess and unpredictable
shifts in tone; and the way in which its bleak, grungy urban backdrop gradually
becomes transformed into a distorted expressionistic version of Fritz Lang’s
M -- but dressed with fairy lights and flashing neon reindeer -- meant that
Jackson’s producers (who were expecting the usual unchallenging genre slasher piece),
dropped the ball with their marketing: the film came out before Silent Night, Deadly
Night, but seems not to have gathered anything like that film’s notorious
reputation, despite being way more evocative and beautifully put together.

Instead, the original You Better Watch Out was quietly forgotten for many years while it
sank into a purgatory of complex sub-distribution deals that led to
unauthorised title changes and poor VHS copies, etc. The film played on 42nd
Street for a time, which is where it was eventually re-discovered by people such
as John Waters, who managed to keep the memory faintly alive until Jackson was
finally able to wrestle back the rights to his original cut and oversee its
restoration for releases such as the present one with the original title
restored to the print -- although Arrow have used the Christmas Evil title
that most fans of the film will know it by for the DVD cover of this version.

The film’s whole approach to
the killer Santa genre is grounded in its bizarre character study of an
aberrant individual whose Christmas-loving psychosis becomes the basis for a
wry take on the cynical commercialisation of the season. Like the recent Finish
fantasy film Rare Exports, Jackson’s screenplay delivers an withering exposé
of the advertising industry’s sanitisation of the whole mythos surrounding Santa,
returning this questionable figure to his darker roots in traditional Germanic
folklore. Father Christmas -- or Black Peter – started off as something of a
vengeful, scary ogre before Coca Cola rebranded him with his current cheerful,
plump, rosy-cheeked grandfather image. The original Santa of legend was
wrathful, and spent as much time punishing and hurting children for their supposed
transgressions as he did rewarding them with presents under the Christmas tree.
This film slyly highlights just how similar the original Santa was to the kind
of oddball nutter it depicts as its central character; the kind who you’d actually cross the street to avoid. Here,
Brandon Maggart plays sad, lonely neighbourhood outcast Harry Stradling: an
isolated Christmas obsessed inadequate who connects with no-one but the little
kids who live in and around his run-down district (most of the shabby-looking
locations were based in New Jersey, though the film is set in New York). He
works in a drab, soul-destroying toy factory (ironically named ‘Jolly Dream
Toys’) where his single-minded obsession with improving the Company’s cheap and
perishable plastic products has seen him promoted from the production line to
the executives’ office, yet still he’s looked down upon by his colleagues and
generally treated with derision and a complete lack of respect.

Former Broadway
musical actor Maggart (now the father of singer Fiona Apple!) gives a pitch-
perfect performance here that completely captures Harry’s deranged personality,
echoing the film’s own schizophrenic tone as the character slips and slides
between comic slapstick exuberance one moment and scary screaming mad guy unpredictability the
next. One minute Harry is rolling out of bed dressed in his Santa pyjamas while
joyfully mimicking all the typical Father Christmas mannerisms and acting out
the familiar contemporary Christmas card image of St. Nick, the next he’s
frantically crushing plastic dolls in a psychotic frenzy while manically
humming ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’ under his breath in his empty, dimly
lit house.

That house is, of course, a
fetishistic shrine to Christmas cheer stuffed full of kitsch, faintly
disturbing Santa Claus memorabilia, the décor all painted in red, green and
white Christmas colours for providing the appropriate setting to any number of
the carefully posed, creepy-looking dolls and toys that fill up every part of Harry’s
living space. He even has his own little hideaway in the garage where he makes his
own toys -- a glowing candle-lit woodshed grotto that looks for all the world
like Santa’s Lapland workshop made reality. This is the story of a man who
loves Christmas so much he actually wants to be Santa … it’s just
that the rest of the world won’t accommodate his warped desires. John Waters,
speaking on one of the two commentaries accompanying this release, likens Harry’s
situation to that of a transsexual who feels themself trapped in the wrong body; only
in this case Harry believes himself to be Santa Claus trapped in the body of a
human schmuck!

In the build up to Christmas Eve, he sets about stitching together
his own Santa costume for the big night. ‘Being’ Father Christmas involves all
sorts of activities that most parents these days might find rather unpalatable
– especially if one were to (as Harry does) mimic the practices of the traditional
folkloric Santa: Harry spends his days, all year round, spying on the activities
of the neighbourhood kids: peering through their windows, peeping on them -- even
in their bedrooms -- through high powered binoculars from the top of a tenement
opposite. He’s noting down their good and bad behaviour in two huge volumes marked
"Good Boys and Girls" and "Bad Boys and Girls" and he seems to have a creepily
comprehensive knowledge of what everyone gets up to: entries include specific
details that indicate Harry’s devoted pretty much all his time to keeping tabs
on these kids; their crimes range from ‘smoked cigarettes in an alley’ and ‘has
bad breath’ to eerily personal observations such as ‘always has to be first in
everything’. He also seems to have taken rather a dubious level of interest in
one particular little girl, whose picture he keeps on his desk and whose entry
in his book of "Good Boys and Girls" reads, simply ‘just a darling!’

The fetishistic angle to
Harry’s obsession is spotlighted in the suggested reason given for his Peter
Pan-ish need to live forever in a bubble of childlike Christmas-themed
expectation: the film’s 1947 prologue depicts in a stylised Christmas card-like
dream haze Harry and his younger brother getting to spy on Santa on Christmas
Eve, watching him coming down their house chimney and eating the mince pies and
drinking the milk their parents have laid out for him. Of course, this magical tableau
has been staged by the kids’ parents -- with their dad dressed up as Santa – to
enhance the magic of the season, but Harry isn’t able to accept that fact and is
driven over the edge when he creeps back down stairs later on and finds ‘Santa’
now lewdly making out with his mom! Harry’s reaction is to grow up deploring
any hint of sex and embracing all aspects of the Christmas spirit with a sort
of sublimated fanatical fervour. The many images in the film of Harry, dressed
in his full Santa Claus regalia, stood outside in the cold while gazing
through people’s windows and into their warmly lit homes, serve to highlight his
self-imposed isolation as well as his voyeurism. Jackson sets out to frame
every shot with exquisite care and many scenes here are actual recreations of
images by 19th Century German-American cartoonist Thomas Nast, whose
sketches of the Santa Claus figure combined the modern white-bearded,
red-suited Coca Cola ideal with the more sinister traditional elements of the character.

The first half of the film concentrates
on detailing Harry Stradling’s strange and aberrant psychology in all its
bizarre but depressingly bleak glory, the film often coming across in tone a lot
like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or Driller Killer but with an
unlikely Christmas theme added! The second half catalogues the events of Christmas
Eve and Christmas day, when Harry sets out to make his demented dreams a
reality: punishing the naughtiest kid in the neighbourhood with the traditional
bag of dirt on the doorstep and breaking and entering into peoples’ homes dressed as
Santa, to either leave the presents he’s carefully selected and made for them,
or to redistribute the presents waiting under their Christmas trees from those he considers
to be undeserving to those who are more in need. Disgusted by his Company’s idea
of a seasonal charity drive at the local Willowy Springs hospital for disabled
children (which is really just a cynical marketing campaign on their part), he
breaks into the toy factory and fills his van with its products to be
distributed to the hospital by him, dressed in his Father Christmas suit. All Harry
wants is to be accepted as Santa and to have people react to him as people
should react to Father Christmas at this time of year. There are moments when
he manages to engineer just such an outcome (a scene in which Harry practices
his Santa persona in the street, with it starting to snow just as he perfects his baritone
‘Merry Christmas!!’, helps invest the viewer fully in his distorted worldview
by its end) and is even strong-armed into attending a Christmas party by some enthusiastic
revellers who make him its star attraction.

But Harry is still tormented
by a lifetime of slights and insults and this is the night for punishing those
who haven’t always displayed the proper level of Christmas spirit in their
dealings with him in the past. Here the film manages to combine its edgy,
grungy New York indie spirit with an enjoyably black style of humour in
sequences where excited kids are shown happily waving ‘Santa Claus’ off not knowing that
he’s just brutally murdered their father in his bed, for instance; or where he’s
shown getting stuck halfway down someone’s chimney stack in a vain attempt to
be authentically Christmassy (Waters reads some overt sexual symbolism into that
scene!). The
police investigation into the spate of Claus-related crimes consists of nabbing all the city’s department store Santas
and forcing them to attend a line-up in front of all the witnesses who saw Santa
slaying people outside of a church, just after they’d come out of Midnight
mass!

But probably the most memorable
image to come from any of these ‘80s Christmas horror flicks is included in
this film when Harry’s murder
spree is reported in the press the next day and he ends up spending Christmas
night being hunted through shabby New York streets and back alleys by a
torch-carrying mob, in what is surly the most amusing tribute to Frankenstein
ever dreamt up. The image of a crying Santa being chased by a vigilante gang
waving flaming torches in a modern city setting (didn’t they have electric
torches in 1980s New York?) is gloriously surreal and highlights the film’s capacity
for shifting tone from the earthy and realistic to the utterly insane -- but then
how else should you be expected to react to some fat bearded guy who breaks into
your house and leers over your kids while they sleep?

There’s also a subtext
about how the inherent dysfunctionality which often exists in relationships between close family
members is brought out more at Christmas than at any other time of year, despite
the season supposedly being all about families coming together: Harry’s highly troubled
relationship with his brother is one of
the key subplots in the movie and the scene with the adult mob chasing Santa
concludes in Jackson’s tribute to Friz Lang’s M when Harry, increasingly
dishevelled and sweaty in his soiled Santa costume, is cornered in a backstreet
courtyard, but the children of his pursuers all crowd around to protect him from
the violence of their own parents -- one little girl even handing him her father’s
knife to protect himself with!

Beautifully photographed,
extremely well-acted and accompanied by a truly unnerving avant-garde sound
design that is inclusive of a score that’s full of warped nerve frazzling Christmassy melodies
played on toy instruments but mixed in with discordant synthesiser atmospherics,
Christmas Evil is a class above most of its peers, but sometimes gets little
credit from those expecting a more conventional ‘slasher’ approach. It is
indeed very deliberately paced, and concludes with what continues to rank as a gloriously ludicrous conceit;
but for me it completely works and weaves its own demented spell. This is going
to become an annual favourite from now on, thanks to the excellent new UK DVD from Arrow Video,
which includes two commentaries (one informative one with writer-director Lewis
Jackson detailing the production history
and the shooting of the film, and one ‘just for fun’ with John Waters watching
it alongside the director); there are some deleted scenes which are actually
pretty worthwhile additions; some short video interviews with Jackson and star
Brandon Maggart; a selection of original storyboards in scroll-thru form; and rare
black and white screen test footage which includes tests by some fairly famous
actors who didn’t get into the film. This edition also includes a collectors’
booklet with writing by Kim Newman and John Waters as well as a new introduction
by Lewis Jackson, plus some rare stills and images from the latter's personal files.
The sleeve features a reversible cover image including original and newly commissioned
artwork by Graham Humphreys.

Thursday, 6 December 2012

Flesh-eating zombies may
never be likely to take over the world for real, but they have certainly
dominated the horror genre for some considerable time now, and the infection
shows no sign of easing up its widespread virulence as the plague continues its lethal
march across the landscape of international horror, consuming all that fall in its path as it rapidly jumps
host and moves from film to computer games, converts the world of graphic
novels and now moves on to its most recent acquisition, TV drama -- which takes the form of AMC’s hugely
popular The Walking Dead, which was based on Robert Kirkman’s popular comic
book series. This multi-platform dominance has been accomplished with apparent ease and equal success. One of the most heavily
susceptible species of media, especially prone to harbouring a particularly unshakable variant
of this most persistent of infections, has long been recognised to be the no-budget independent feature.
The living dead have planted themselves firmly in place and taken root
in that film backwater, as a permanent fixture that shows little indication of
being supplanted anytime soon: all any aspiring Fulci needs these days, after
all, is a camcorder, a little bluish grey face make-up and an "extra" or two
happy to moan incoherently and affect a shambling gait for the viewfinder (and if they have no
objection to chowing down on some raw butchers’ guts, all the better), and his/her film career is up
and running!

Of course, very few of these flicks -- the vast majority of which are customarily proven to be amateurish dreck of the first order -- are worth even the
effort it takes to insert the disc into a DVD drive, yet still they keep on coming
by the dozen, dominating the landscape through a persistence of numbers that eventually
makes them impossible to hold out against as they continue their mindless mission to fill DVD bargain
bins in never ending bulk supply.

The zombie sub-genre remains popular of course (which
partially accounts for this abundant harvest of flesh-eating variants) and it
still occasionally but regularly supplies interesting material; yet one can’t help
but be aware of the poverty of imagination which ultimately lies at the root of
the ubiquity of the phenomenon. Yet, if there’s one interesting thing to comes out
of a recent collection of zombie-based indies, released in the UK as a
double-disc set by Monster Pictures (distributed by Eureka Entertainment), then
it’s the set's inadvertent highlighting of the fact that the zombie sub-genre is actually capable
of sustaining an incredibly wide selection of divergent approaches, and there are a
spectrum of distinctions to be made, even within the indie movie bracket alone. Of course, the
term ‘indie’ also covers a multitude of budgets and standards of professionalism,
but rest assured -- everything included here meets a certain core level of
competence (in other words, there’s nothing included in this set that is a complete
insult to your eyes!), whether it be shot for tuppence on DV or aspires to widescreen
cinematic standards of presentation. Across two discs, we’re given over five
hours’ worth of zombie shorts from all over the world and in all sorts of styles,
incorporating comedy, romance, action, satire and even the odd existential
meditation. Although it’s an obvious PR line to take, there is indeed something here for everyone: if a
particular short doesn’t happen to do it for you, then there’s every chance that the next one along
will float your boat instead. The shooting standard ranges from grungy indie DV
amateur style to comparatively glossy-looking fare. And there’s even a puppet animation
zombie western here as well! The variety extends to running time, as we're given everything from brief five minute vignettes to hour-long mini features, with most entries averaging around fifteen minutes in length.

Dutch directing duo Barend de
Voogd and Rob van der Velden demonstrate versatility even with the simplicity
of their opener’s minimalist set-up: Zombeer(2008, Netherlands, 11 min) is an initially slick comedy short that highlights what
happens when a bibulous brewer at a high-tech distillery keels over and drowns
in a huge vat of his firm’s finest booze (‘beer with a bite’ is the company’s
apposite tag-line!). Not only is the dead man (Rogier Schippers) reanimated by
a secret mixture that’s being stirred-up in the bowels of the brewery, but
everyone who samples it (which includes a party of Japanese day trippers) instantly
becomes a flesh-craving revenant too. This quickie spans the gamut of the
zombie sub-genre’s stylistic traits: starting off as a fairly proficiently
filmed piece of work before moving into a (presumed) parody of [REC] by having most of the climactic
zombie action shot as found-footage, viewed from the POV of the shaky camcorder of one of the
fleeing visitors to the brewery. Similarly, Zombies and Cigarettes (2009,
Spain, 17min), also directed by a
duo, Inaki San Roman & Rafa Martinez, takes the most familiar scenario
imaginable – a zombie outbreak in a Spanish shopping mall which leads to a small
group of survivors barricading themselves against the hordes – and uses it as something of
a director’s show reel: it’s extremely well-shot and sharply edited, and it has gathered a
raft of festival awards including some for best visual FX and best director.
One can see why its flashy slickness would attract such attentions ... it may be
the least original of any of the films included here, but it does at least attempt
something interesting and new with the bitter-sweet cynicism of its conclusion, and the brief running time is perfectly judged for preventing it from outstaying its welcome.

Zombies and Cigarettes (2009) Spain

Joseph Avery and Matt Simpson’s
Plague
(2008, UK, 17 min) heads for
more obviously satirical waters in a grungy tale about an illegal migrant and gun-runner who flees the troubles of his Latvian homeland and winds up in a London that’s
become overrun by the living dead. This sombre tale of urban isolation and
despair makes fitting use of the zombie metaphor to examine the alienation, loneliness
and persecution suffered by those forced to make a life for themselves in the jostling
metropolitan sprawl that is contemporary London by removing the "jostle" and the "sprawl" and
leaving only the apocalyptic decay of the aftermath of zombie plague. There’s
one affecting and atmospheric scene in the middle of this piece which occurs
when the narrator and protagonist investigates a derelict building, resulting
in one of the most well-executed scare scenes to grace any of the films in the
set. Duncan Laing’s Bitten (2008, UK, 6 min)
is another downbeat effort with an intriguing and disturbing premise. Here we
join a young woman, played by Claire Wilson, in the middle of a zombie infestation and
after she has just been bitten and is awaiting her own imminent transformation
in the familiar surroundings of her home. Tense, ugly and grim, this is a fraught meditation on
the prospect of the loss of one’s own faculties -- a situation which, frankly, will face us all
in some form or other eventually. It combines gruelling body horror with a thought-provoking
contemplation of mortality, and is only let down by poor "pancake" zombie face make-up,
which rather breaks its spell. Another low budget effort, Arise (2010, USA, 18 min), attempts to excuse
its own shoddy splatter effects with recourse to a facetious line in silly humour. The
annoyingly cliched Death Metal soundtrack and the deliberately bad gore which accompanies
all the "action" throughout risks losing the goodwill of the viewer fairly quickly, but this
does actually have a thoughtful payoff about parental responsibility and maturity behind
a long line of suppurating zombie cadavers shuffling forth to be deprived of
limbs when the hero’s proficiency with his work tools finds another use after the living dead
invade his workshop. Not
Even Dead (2009, USA, 5 min)
examines the misguided urge to hang on to a loved one and hope that a cure can eventually be found for
the zombie infection: David (Joseph Will) keeps his zombified wife(Treva Tegtmeier) chained up in
the basement and illegally feeds her, convinced there is still some remnant of
the woman he used to know preserved inside the salivating creature’s brain.
This is a bleak little tale about the catastrophic repercussions of irrational,
undying love. Unfortunately, well-enough staged as it is, it just doesn’t go anywhere you don’t already expect it to go to.

Bitten (2008) UK

Randy Smith’s Fear
of the Living Dead (2009, USA, 16
mins) is a cheaply shot attempt to do action and mystery with a small cast
and a tiny budget and never really gets convincingly off the ground. April Campbell plays a young woman who believes she is the
last woman left on Earth thanks to her immunity to the zombie virus, which has
turned the rest of the world into flesh-craving ghouls. However, while raiding
suburban houses for supplies she finds she isn’t the only remaining human being
who's out and about after all. After becoming well-used to living in "survivalist" mode, this discovery becomes a difficult
circumstance to adjust to. But she may well now be in even more danger than ever before.
This is watchable enough as far as it goes, but it’s too slight and
cheap-looking to pass muster as anything else but a minor quickie. Kidz (2010, Canada, 9 mins), on the other hand,
is a delightful comic vignette in which a trio of child friends prove to be well-equipped
for the death of their parents during a zombie plague because of their well-honed proficiency at shoot-em-up video
games. Approaching the entire ordeal as just another game, they suit up as super-powered
comic heroes and set about protecting the neighbourhood from the encroaching
zombie hordes. Nicely acted by the young leads, this combines zom-com humour
with a gentle evocation of the nostalgic joys of childhood fantasy and play.

Kidz (2010) Canada

The Book of Zombie (2007, USA, 64
min) is, of course, the most substantial work here in terms of running time,
and thus it’s no surprise that this is the one which most successfully manages
to build up some degree of character interaction, which helps to create and hold on
to viewer interest. A troubled married couple (Brian Ibsen and Larisa Peters) attempt to
bond on Halloween night while their daughter is away having a sleepover with
friends, but the evening is already going far from well for their relationship when
the couple are suddenly assailed by zombie Mormons at their door who have taken
over the small sleepy Utah town in which they live. As they battle through the
streets to reach their daughter, they meet a couple of stoned and slightly
vacant slacker youths working late in a local store, and the group attempts to hole up in
a Medieval themed bar with a feisty waitress who’s got her zombie boss locked
up in the store room. The conceit behind this gory comedy is that only Mormons
are initially affected by the zombie infection, and they can only be stopped by
exposure to caffeine (Mormons won’t touch anything that contains it, apparently),
which is most readily available to our heroes in the form of soft drinks sold in the
store they find themselves barricaded in (one character meets his end when his
defensive can of Coke turns out to be of the decaffeinated variety!).

The Book of Mormon (2007) USA

Andrew
Loviska puts in a decent effort as the laconic, bespectacled slacker shop clerk
Darwin, and Ibsen and Peters make their initially annoying bickering couple (who
are gradually brought closer together over the urgent need to kick some serious
Mormon zombie butt) more and more likable as the film proceeds towards its
Evil Dead-style splatter-based finale. Not quite so likable in the comedy stakes is the British
effort from Sat Johal, Tony Jopia and John Payne: Zombie Harvest (2003, UK, 11 min) starts with someone tripping over while trying to
escape from a zombie revenant by running through a farm, and ending up with their head
stuck up a cow’s arse; things go pretty much downhill from there on. A few nice
shots near the end, of a ghostly army of the re-animated dead shuffling, like
rotted Fulci-esque cadavers, through a cornfield in the Oxfordshire countryside,
is small compensation for this facetiously narrated tale which is told from
the viewpoint of a soldier from a nearby American base, who’s on the turn after being
attacked by a scientist who's been experimenting on himself with a genetic virus that has had some unforeseen
consequences.

The Skin of Your Teeth (2009, USA, 14
mins) is more a vignette than a fully-fledged short, and ends up leaving the
viewer wanting more. But in terms of atmosphere and creepiness it’s by far the
most successful piece included in this collection and is actually my favourite.
Shot on a working farm in Western New Jersey by Dan Gingold -- a
director/producer/editor based in Brooklyn, New York -- the film expertly uses
landscape and space to create a mood of forboding which has a Cormic McCarthy-style sense of impending
doom about it. The dialogue is kept to an absolute minimum and the set-up is conveyed
visually, as we are introduced to a quartet of young survivors from a recent
zombie plague taking refuge in a derelict farmhouse on the brow of a
hill surrounded by a flat expanse of countryside. The group monitor emergency
radio broadcasts for news and keep watch for the approaching hordes from the
roof of the farm building using binoculars. The film vividly evokes a sense of
dread relying on the featureless landscape as a means of emphasising the fact that
there is nowhere to hide, and when the zombies eventually do come, the frantic battle
for survival is by far the most visceral and scary out of this bunch of films because of this acrophobic
feeling of the vastness of the countryside that the dead are seen to now dominate. Poor
zombie makeup may slightly let the side down, but the last few minutes are the
most terrifying out of any of the shorts here.

The Skin of Your Teeth (2009) USA

David M. Reynolds’ Zomblies
(2009, UK, 47 minutes) is the
other substantial work included in the set, with its TV episode-like run-time
enabling a proper storyline to unfold rather than just the sketching out of a
mood or the delivery of a set-piece. It’s steeped in the stylistic mannerisms
and tone of 28 Days Later and its ilk, with shaky camerawork and digitally
de-saturated colour tones ... but it sets up its dystopian world quite effectively
and sells the action set-pieces it’s been designed to convey with conviction. There’s
also quite an enveloping score accompanying this action and gore-drenched
apocalypse. This is basically a ‘guys on-a mission’ film in which an elite
squad of Rangers are sent out beyond the automatic-machine-gun topped wall, that
provides a protective perimeter for a high-tech military base with a control
room that looks like CTU from 24,in search of a rookie bunch of
zombie hunters who have gone missing after leaving a distress call. The macho
squad soon find themselves in trouble when it turns out that the zombie virus
is mutating and can infect people even if they’re only exposed to the blood of
one of the dead. There’s nothing wrong with this film other than the fact that
it’s just a straight-down-the-line, low budget version of a typical zombie
action film, with nothing new to offer. Performances are generally acceptable
but characters, as tends to be the case with such material, are simply "types" and
its hard to get more than casually engaged with the plight of the cookie cutter
squad of military men who find themselves cornered and cut-off in a wilderness
of marauding dead, as their superiors decide to cut their losses and bomb the
whole area with their men still in it.

If it’s originality rather
than straight-line thrills and action you’re after then look no further than
the next offering: It Came from the West (2007,
Denmark, 16 min) is an animated western created with hand puppets and
directed by a 27 year-old student of the National Film School of Denmark called
Tor Fruergaard. It tells the story of a freckle-faced, ginger-haired youngster
with an overbite, called Virgil. Bulled by his oafish father and the mean guys
who prop up the bar at his local saloon, who collectively dismiss him as
nothing but “a wannabe cowboy weak pisser”, this plug-eared hero finds himself
trapped between a rock and a hard place when the daily round of abuse he
suffers at the hands of his daddy and his boorish friends is interrupted by a
good ol’ zombie siege. A serial killer called the Dark Destroyer has been busy
chain-sawing the local redskin population to death, and the natives decide to
strike back by raising the dead in a sacred ceremony to take revenge on the white man. Before the bog-eyed-ugly
cast of totem-faced cowboys have realised what’s going on, the Saloon is
besieged by flesh-eating zombies freshly risen from a nearby graveyard and it’s up to Virgil to fend them off
as the other patrons meet a variety of gory deaths at their undead hands. This humorous
puppet adventure revels in outrageous cartoon gore, quirky characters and a
great score that mixes tribal drumming and some extra twangy tremolo guitar licks.

It Came from the West (2007) Denmark

Gregory Morinhas’ Paris
by Night of the Living Dead (2009,
France, 12 min) takes some stylish cinematography and cartoonish CGI
splatter effects and combines them with fluid camera movement and vertiginous
crane shots to make up this fast-moving action-fest, in which the dead take over
the streets of a series of Parisian tourist destinations and only a
handsome-looking, newly married young couple (Karina Testa and David Saracino)
are available to fend them off when their wedding vows are interrupted by the
zombie outbreak. This twelve minute piece is all about style, with the couple whipping
off their wedding clothes in a trice and producing huge pump-action hand guns
from nowhere (it’s always good to come prepared) before striking a series of
action poses while variously either machine gunning, decapitating or otherwise eviscerating
the staggering zombie crowds. The CGI is pretty low rent, but then that only
adds to the cartoony artifice of the action, and despite the superficiality of
it all, this manages a few tense moments and even a little poignancy at the end.

Paris by Night of the Living Dead (2009) France

Tarunabh Dutta’s Savages
(2011, India, 39 min) is
billed as one of India’s first independent zombie films and the imagery that
comes with its interesting mixture of semi-rural/jungle locations is certainly
different enough from anything seen in the other films included here to make
this fairly cheaply-made effort stand out, although the influence of The Evil
Dead and a few other classic Italian-made zombie films is always
apparent. Unfortunately, the enthusiasm of the participants in front of and
behind the camera is rather fatally undermined by the sheer amateurishness of
the cast performances. This mostly just looks like a bunch of mates having a
laugh with a video camera while they spend a weekend making their own zombie
picture. The story, in which a group of teenagers idly amble off into India's equivalent of the backwoods
on the outskirts of their village in order to give one of their number a special ‘treat’
by taking him on a camping trip to a contaminated area that’s been sealed off as a
biohazard for years, requires said characters to behave with more than the
usual quota of stupidity we expect to find distributed among the cast of zombie
fodder flicks like this. There’s a dishevelled-looking ‘wise man’ who at first tries to
warn them off and then, when that doesn’t work, resorts to martial arts skills
to get rid of them; but by then it's already too late and one of the group gets
infected with the zombie-inducing contaminate with predictably half-arsed
results.

The final film in this
collection, Dead Hungry (2009, UK, 10
min), is the surprise gem of the bunch and is probably best summed up by
its tag line: ‘life’s a bitch, and then you die. Then you’re a zombie, and
death’s a bitch too.’ The unfortunate
protagonist of this little adventure is a forlorn-looking and very hungry revenant
with a rumbling belly who’s in desperate need of fresh brains. Stumbling through
a forest clearing, dressed in baggy dungarees, our “hero” encounters a number
of classic clichéd zombie/horror movie situations but is too generally hopeless
at being a member of the walking dead to capitalise on them. Basically, he’s just
a little bit clueless when it comes to the business of eating people. Director William Bridges deals in a
wry, poignant humour that closely resembles the attitude of Shaun
of the Dead, but here it’s the
hapless zombie we feel for, and his point of view we take throughout this ten
minute film ... not that of the potential victims he’s attempting to make a meal of. When
the classic zombie siege situation develops after a bunch of American teenagers
attempt to take refuge in an old log cabin, it is the poor old hungry zombie outside
whose fortunes we’re actually following, as he continually gets crowded out by
the other more pushy zombies surrounding the trapped kids' hideout, who are also attempting to break in.
Eventually a quirky little ‘romantic’ relationship develops between "our" zombie and another
female zombie who's also taking part in the siege -- and the ironic bittersweet ending
takes the concept of funeral humour to extremes!

Dead Hungry (2009) UK

As a collection, the films included in
this Monsters Pictures releasedemonstrate the full range and the great versatility
the zombie film is still capable of; and although a few of the entries merely deliver
standard zombie flick fare, many others remind us how there is still more than
a spark of life left in the genre’s shambling cadaver, should the more inspired indie writers and
directors choose to search for it.

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